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Volume 28, Number 4, Winter 2006

dLIST & DL-Harvest: Open Access Services for Library and Information Science

dLIST is the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology. It is the first open access archive, established in 2002, exclusively for the Library and Information Science disciplines. Scholars can self-register and deposit a range of materials in dLIST such as research articles, instructional units, bibliographies, datasets and survey instruments. A strong editorial board comprised of top-notch researchers and leading librarians approves the materials into the archive. The innovative dLIST Classics project is digitizing fundamental texts - e.g., Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science. DL-Harvest is an aggregator and meta-search that brings together materials from fourteen open access and global archives in LIS (including dLIST) and 18,319 information resources are currently available through DL-Harvest.

dLIST also hosts open access journals such as Bibliographica. In the sciences, there are many attempts to build the digital library of a discipline using ideas from common pool resources theories for access and use management of the information resources. The basic premise of these efforts is that many types of information, including scholarly research articles, should be openly and freely accessible. dLIST can thus be called an emerging commons-based digital library for library and information science and is spearheading an effort to build a scholarly consortium for LIS. Here are a few other facts about dLIST:

Innovative Author and User Features and Services include:

• RSS Subscription to new materials
• Self-registration and deposit
• Search multiple LIS archives including dLIST
• Detailed Usage Statistics for each item

Statistics:

• Registered users in dLIST: 1094
• Full-text items in dLIST: 768
• Records in DL-Harvest: 18,319
• Hits on dLIST in September 2006: 257,800